In 2015, former Director of Central Intelligence David Petraeus (U.S. Army, ret.) advocated arming members of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, in a bid to fight the Islamic State. It was one of the most dangerous and baffling proposals in recent memory. In effect, Petraeus sought to arm active members of al-Qaeda, a globally designated terrorist organization, to help defeat another terrorist group that shares the same ideology.
Policymakers did not dismiss Petraeus’s suggestion as fringe. Petraeus remains influential in Washington and so policymakers circulated it. Petraeus specifically argued that elements of the al-Nusra Front were potentially “reformable” and that the United States could peel them away from al-Qaeda and repurpose them as U.S. proxies in the war against the Islamic State.
Petraeus’s thinking rested on a flawed assumption that jihadist militants could somehow be turned into strategic partners against both the regime and the Islamic State.
Petraeus’s 2015 proposal was not a new idea suddenly conceived to deal with the Islamic State threat. It was merely an attempt to make official a policy that had been in motion behind the scenes for years. In fact, in a February 2012 email, later exposed in the WikiLeaks files, Jake Sullivan, then-senior policy advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and later National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden, wrote to Clinton that “[al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.” At that moment, Petraeus was serving as director of Central Intelligence, overseeing U.S. intelligence operations in the region. The implication was clear: arming or cooperating with jihadist groups like al-Nusra was not some fringe suggestion; it had already become part of U.S. strategic thinking, even if policymakers never publicly admitted this.
Petraeus’s thinking rested on a flawed assumption that jihadist militants could somehow be turned into strategic partners against both the regime and the Islamic State. It was as if the United States had learned nothing from its long list of foreign policy disasters, from arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s (which gave birth to al-Qaeda) to empowering sectarian militias in Iraq and Syria, which fueled cycles of extremism and bloodshed.
Many warned, even then, that this plan was madness—not only morally indefensible, but strategically suicidal. Petraeus and those who supported the approach ignored the history’s lessons. The outcome was predictable: the strengthening of jihadist networks, further destabilization of Syria, and the collapse of any coherent counterterrorism policy.
The message should always be clear: Do not arm jihadists, no matter whom they claim to be fighting.
A decade later, Washington witnesses the fruits of that policy. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, once a senior member of the Islamic State, and then the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise Petraeus wanted to empower, is now the de facto, self-appointed president of Syria, presiding over an Islamist terrorist regime in Damascus. Worse still, Western governments now legitimize, recognize, and support him—never mind that until December 2024, they officially labeled him a terrorist.
This is not a surprise. It is the logical outcome of a reckless strategy. The message should always be clear: Do not arm jihadists, no matter whom they claim to be fighting. Such warnings fell on deaf ears. And today, Syria pays the price—and soon, the whole world will.
This was not just a policy failure. It was the deliberate empowerment of extremists, a willful blindness that valued short-term tactical gains over long-term security, regional stability, and innocent lives. The result: terrorist warlords rising to power, Western silence turning into complicity, and a shattered Syria left in the hands of fanatics who continue to commit atrocities and massacres daily.
